Panorama plans new corruption in racing report

Five years after a controversial exposé that promised to blow the lid off what it called "the corruption of horse racing" but sparked furious claims of bias, BBC1's Panorama is set to take on the sport again. A BBC spokesman yesterday confirmed that the Panorama team was working on what he described as a follow-up to the 2002 programme that only made it to air following a series of heated high court cases.

The programme is being made by some of the same team who made the original one-hour special and is expected to take as its start point the court case involving the six-times champion jockey Kieren Fallon that began this week at the Old Bailey. Fallon is one of six defendants in the trial, the result of a long investigation by the City of London police into horse racing.

Charges of conspiracy to defraud were laid against Fallon and his fellow defendants in July 2006 following an investigation into alleged race-fixing.

Relying on the allegations of the former Jockey Club head of security Roger Buffham, the 2002 programme contained accusations of race-fixing and doping and accused the Jockey Club of failing to maintain the integrity of racing.

The Jockey Club dismissed the programme as "a bit of fluff" and accused the BBC of bias for not making it clear that Buffham left the Jockey Club following an investigation into allegations of harassment.

Many within the sport felt that, given the pre-publicity generated by the court cases over whether or not Buffham could reveal his former employer's secrets, the end result was underwhelming. But it forced Buffham's successor to quit, and within four years the Jockey Club had been subsumed into the British Horseracing Board. Since then, several jockeys have been punished for exchanging information for money.

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